Is anyone else disappointed by the Spanish subjunctive form?
After three years of living in Argentina, after finally feeling comfortable hearing and using the subjunctive form, I have come to the conclusion that it is completely useless as a language feature.
It adds no subtlety, no flavor. It is simply a rule to follow. Is there is a single sentence in which the use of the subjunctive is optional, where the speaker is actually conveying something by using it or not? If so, I haven’t noticed it yet.
It’s too bad, too, because I was really looking forward to understanding the subtlety that an optional subjunctive could add to a language.
The subjunctive exists in English, too, but its use has mostly died out. The last few uses, such as “If I were you…” instead of “If I was you…”, are becoming so widely misused that I imagine that some day both will be considered equally correct. And wouldn’t that be a good thing? Isn’t having fewer rules better, making a language easier to learn and use correctly? Especially when the rules only add complexity for complexity’s sake.
El subjuntivo… que se muera…
The subjunctive tenses are very important features of the Spanish language. You don’t provide here enough reasons to support your assertion that the Spanish subjunctive is a useless feature of Spanish or that it doesn’t add subtlety or flavor to the language.
I don’t know about flavor, but the subjunctive certainly adds to the subtlety of Spanish!
I agree with you that learning the subjunctive tenses can be a very laborious task, however, failing to make an effort to learn and use these tenses can only result in an inefficient ability to use standard Spanish. Thus the subjunctive does not exist in Spanish only for complexity sake. On the other hand, its complexity is something that with proper professional help and dedication by learners can easily be overcome.
Without the subjunctive tenses – present and imperfect – users of Spanish, both in the oral or written forms, can be in great difficulty to convey many aspects relating to the meaning of language. Consider the following sentences:
1. ‘Ellos pueden bailar’
2. ‘Ellos puedan bailar’
Sentence 1 is not meaning the same thing as sentence 2. The first one is using the present indicative and it means ‘they can dance’; the second uses the present subjunctive and it means ‘they may/might be able to dance’.
I will be writing a post on the subjunctive sometime soon to add to what I’m contributing here.
Comment by Luis — November 29, 2007 @ 1:29 pm
PS:
I forgot to mention that without the subjunctive you would’ve not been able to state with such fine subtlety what you write at the last line of your post.
Comment by Luis — November 29, 2007 @ 1:55 pm
Hi Luis,
Thanks for the comments!
I think the last line of my post was basically just a shorter form of “Espero que se muera.” And as far as I know, when expressing your wishes for/about someone/something else, you always use the subjunctive. So that was my point, I was just following the rules.
Another way to express “maybe they can dance” would be “Tal vez puedan bailar.” No?
So in both cases, the existence of the subjunctive has allowed us to drop the word(s) that means “maybe” or “I hope” or “I wish”. We drop the words that explicitly suggest the uncertainty, and we inject that uncertainty into the verb itself. So that’s fine, but it’s not subtle, it’s not flavor, it’s just following rules and dropping redundant words.
What I would like is to be able to say (and be understood): “Estoy seguro que vengan.” It would be just like changing your tone of voice or facial expression to express sarcasm, but it would be part of the language! Now that would get interesting! But, as far as I know, no one would understand that. They would assume I was just using the wrong word. What do you think?
Comment by ianmcintosh — November 29, 2007 @ 6:22 pm